Thursday, December 24, 2015

Christmas
message"The very scandal of Christianity lies in
the fact that it sees divinity in humanity. It’s a hard idea to swallow, after
all. Every major religion recognizes the role of the Creator in the development
of life, of course. But in it? Part of it? Identified with it? Gods everywhere
look down from the heavens of the world religions and pronounce laws or grapple
with demons or pass judgment from on high. Only Christianity argues that the
Creator has taken on the flesh and blood of creation in order to bring us to
assert the divine in ourselves.

In the Christmas story we see God become
helpless, become like us, become subject to the tensions of growth, become flesh
so we might have the confidence to recognize that we have the stuff it takes to
become like God.

So what is this about renouncing flesh? How can we call
the way God made us inherently bad as philosophers have done since the time of
Aristotle?

The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning says of it, “Earth is
crammed with heaven.”

The flesh, in other words, is all we have. It is
our glory. It is our power. It is sweet. It is beautiful. And it is the clay out
of which we shape a better tomorrow. "